My Life and My Efforts

by Karl May

In this manner, they had talked to Fischer, and this persuaded him to buy the business. Of this, he assured me. That my novels had been altered, he knew. He only did not know precisely by whom. Probably by Walter. After all, he had nothing else to do than these kinds of things, and he also had to read the proof sheets. And this was not a difficult task at all and could be done very quickly. Only one word would have to be changed or a few words would have to be added, and already the "indecency" is there, without which such novels are quite inconceivable. I would be able to prove these changes quite easily; I would only have to present my original manuscripts.

"But they have been burnt!" I interjected.

But Fischer denied this quite decisively. He insisted that they were still there. He could get them for me, though, of course, he would not do so under the present conditions, with me being his opponent in a lawsuit and ruining him with my injunction. He could only help me and testify in my favour, if I would drop this injunction and settle with him.

This conversation was infinitely important to me. I had to be careful. I wondered, whether I could trust him. If the original manuscripts were really still there, I would indeed been able to silence all accusations against me, as Fischer had said, with a single stroke. But he might have intended to deceive me, or he might have been deceived himself. I was not allowed to decide too hastily; I had to observe and to think, especially since this turn of events in my affairs occurred at a time in which severe internal struggles kept me thus busy that I was unable to find either time or space for other things. This was the time of my divorce.

To be honest, I very much tend towards the Catholic view of marriage, regarding it as a sacrament. If I would not be of this opinion, I would have taken this step much sooner and not only when my health, my life, and my entire internal and external existence was at stake. This step has been held against me to a high degree, and very unjustly so. Catholic critics, who, instead of staying on a factual basis, let their attacks wander over into the personal, have accused me in the same breath of being a Protestant and of having divorced my wife. How unlogical! It is because I am regarded as a Protestant that nobody has the right to hold that second fact against me. To every even just mildly decent person, a divorce is a matter which is most naturally treated with discretion. But mine was dragged through the newspapers, supplemented with the most disgusting marginal glosses, and abused for the most outrageous speculations. I want to skip all of this here, to remark on this, if I should be forced to do so, in another place. This time was not just for me, but also for Mrs. Plöhn, a time of almost deadly afflictions, because it deprived her of her husband, whom she loved with a self-sacrifice, as rarely a man was ever loved. I have already said that Plöhn had become ill on the journey to Egypt. He only seemed to recover. The malady was repeated, after he had returned home. One year later, death came. Mrs. Plöhn almost collapsed. If it had not been for her mother, she would have surely died, following her husband. Fortunately, the correspondence she conducted for me with my readers also offered her the spiritual relief and support she required. She owned two rented houses in Dresden, which she would have liked to sell, to be able to buy a piece of land in the country, belonging to the village Niedersedlitz, which had been offered to her. Fischer had moved his printing-plant there. His private apartment was also there. Mrs. Plöhn asked me to accompany her on a visit of this lot, and once we happened to be in Niedersedlitz, the idea came most naturally to let Fischer know about it. He invited us to his private apartment, and there a negotiation evolved which led to a settlement the day after.

I want to make it as brief as possible. Fischer complained that, in buying the Münchmeyer business, he had degraded himself to the level of a "trashy publisher"; he assured us that he was yearning to get out of this, and he insisted that I could assist him in this like nobody else. Of the latter, I was also convinced. He had purchased the altered novels, without Mrs. Münchmeyer having the right to sell them to him. If he made sure that my original manuscripts were returned to me, he could drop the trashy stuff and publish my originals in their place; this would help him and me as well; he would no longer be a trashy publisher, and I would be able to prove that I had not written anything indecent. This was the basic idea of the settlement, and when we signed it, I was convinced that all disputes were resolved. At this time, Fischer attested to me publicly in the newspapers that the indecent passages of my Münchmeyer novels were not the product of my pen, but rather had been put in by a third party.

But unfortunately, my hopes turned out to be deceptive. Fischer was unable to get my original manuscripts; they did not exist any more; they had really been destroyed. So, it had been impossible for him to transform from a "trashy publisher", as he described himself in a letter to me, into a book publisher. He did make the attempt, though, to obtain an original novel even without my original manuscripts, in order to be able to drop the trash then, but I had to deny him the help, he demanded from me in this. What he demanded from me was to change the trash back into its former, impeccable version just based on my memory; but this was, considering the huge amount of about thirty thousand pages, tightly filled with text, an absolute impossibility. But he insisted on his contract, on our settlement, and though he was unable to do as he had promised, I was still supposed to do everything, which was, even if for no other reason than him, impossible. From this resulted a new disagreement and a new struggle, which extended beyond his death and was only by his heirs brought to a peaceful conclusion. They saw things clearer than he did, and they were of calm, unbiased minds. They were experts, which is to say: lawyers, merchants, owners of printing-plants and bookbinderies. They agreed on the following declaration:

"In a lawsuit between Mr. Karl May and the heirs of Mr. Adalbert Fischer, the heirs of Mr. Fischer have declared that the novels by the author Karl May, published by the company of H.G. Münchmeyer, have in the course of time been altered by means of additions and variations by a third party to such an extent that in their present form, they can no longer be regarded as Karl May's creation. Mr. May has been authorised to publish this declaration.

"Dresden, October 1907."

This declaration is signed by the widow Mrs. Elisabeth Fischer, the merchant Arthur Schubert, the owner of a printing-plant Otto Fischer, the owner of a bookbindery Alfred Sperling, the lawyer Trummler, the lawyer Bernstein, the lawyer Dr. Elb. Irresponsible people have pretended that this declaration had only been made by children and mentally incompetent persons. From this, you can also see with what kinds of weapons I am being attacked. But for me, the section of my Münchmeyer trial dealing with Fischer has been closed by this. But the section dealing with Pauline Münchmeyer still exists. I now have to turn to her in the following.